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Friday, August 24, 2012

“BRIC and EMEA”“Cultural bias”“Global brand relevance”If you work in market research in a multi-national corporation, you may use the above terms almost every day.If you work in market research in a small US-based company serving only local markets, they may not be as relevant to you.And then there are many of us who are somewhere in the middle, working in companies who are either considering overseas expansion or who have recently taken the plunge into foreign markets.Chances are if you fall into any of the three buckets above, you could use some brushing up on global research and insights, because those insights may be directly relevant to you regarding the countries in which you work or will be working soon, or the insights may be more tangential but still relevant to keeping your research brain “fresh.”If you’re the global research lead learner in your corporation (like me), it’s absolutely imperative to build those global research skills and keep them fresh. Especially if you’re not the feet-on-the-ground in those overseas markets, but still need to manage the research…which I know is the case for many of you.That’s why I’m over-the-moon excited that there is such an international presence at TMRE this year with speakers from India, Russia, the Netherlands, Canada, Singapore, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, and more. I plan to listen, learn, and “be a sponge” of information in their sessions.That’s also why I’m going early to TMRE to take part in the Pre-Conference Summits on Monday (11/12), particularly the Global Research and Insights track. Sessions such as “Understanding Local Culture to Build Effective Research Strategies in International Markets” given by PepsiCo Russia will hopefully give me some new insights into different overseas markets that my company works in. And that will make me a better researcher.I hope you’ll join me at the Pre-Conference Summits on Monday, November 12th – I’d love to learn from YOU, especially if you’re doing some fascinating international research that you’d like to share!

Monday, August 20, 2012

The concept of content curation has been on my mind a lot this week.For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, it is the process of identifying, organizing and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic or issue online. Content curation can be a very valuable activity in your business, as it can make you a recognized and trusted resource for pertinent news and important information…and it can keep you continually visible to your audience.The trending of content curation as a “hot topic” has really taken off in the last few years, which is not a surprise as the pace of data and content creation is expanding exponentially each year. In fact, back in 2010 Nielsen and AOL estimated that 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. You can bet that number has gone up since then. Talk about drinking from a fire hose of information!In fact, many marketers are using content curation as a key component of their content marketing strategy, according to Curata’s 2012 Content Curation Adoption Survey, with 95 percent of respondents indicating they have curated content in the past six months. In my company, content curation comes up a lot, because we strive to be a recognized and trusted resource for news and information in the various industries we serve and curation is certainly part of our strategy.With many of us in a state of overwhelm with the amount of market research knowledge that’s out there, it’s no surprise that many of us have turned to content curators (our trusted friends, industry leaders, and great research thinkers) as we’re all in need of someone to curate the wealth of content that’s out there for us. As Kelley mentioned in her recent blog post here,” Developments in our industry and technology are moving so fast, it's hard to keep up.“ That’s why we select who we follow on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with care, subscribe to specific industry journals and Paper.Lis, add specific blogs to our reader, etc. Those sources are curating content for us.But we also need to cultivate the skill of being curators ourselves.Why?Because essentially we are research content (and data) curators for our customers, and we need to be good ones. If you think about it, presenting our clients with ALL of the data from a study in raw format would be like asking them to drink from that fire hose previously mentioned! Even a 25-question survey with 500 respondents is a lot of raw data for them to look at.We need to be good curators, identifying, organizing and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic or issue, by teasing out insights, knowing how to find the story in the data, removing our bias and personal filters, and by knowing who you’re curating the data for (your audience) and what data and delivery method will resonate most.The pace of online content sharing and data creation is only going to increase over time, so curation (both employing it and learning it) is an important skill to master!

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

I am by no means a Big Data expert.
That’s why I’m excited to learn more about Big Data at TMRE via the “Data Analytics and BIG Data” sessions. Depending on who you speak with, the definition for Big Data differs. From petabytes and exabytes of data to simply more data than an organization can currently handle with the tools commonly used to capture and process it. As a “numbers geek” the topic of Big Data fascinates me!

You know what else fascinates me? The Olympics. I sit mesmerized for 16 days watching stories of triumph, defeat, and overcoming adversity to achieve Olympic glory. Yep, I was one of those kids who climbed up on couch pillows, envisioning they were an Olympic podium to receive my gold medal. When I got older I competed (not on THAT level!) in synchronized swimming...and if you don’t believe that’s a sport, try holding your breath for up to three minutes while underwater, upside down and treading water with your hands for a start.
As a research and analytics-focused person, what I think is especially notable about this Olympics is the data. Now, there are some big numbers, such as 10,500 Olympic athletes and 4200 Paralympic athletes, 302 medal events, some 60,000 meals a day cooked for athletes, and so on. And then there are some BIG numbers:

-For the first time ever in the United States, NBC is offering every moment of competition live via nbcolympics.com, which equates to around 3,500 hours of coverage. Many of you reading this work in media research and know that’s a lot of video storage bytes!

-There were an estimated 1billion people tuning in to watch the opening ceremonies worldwide, and a documented 40.7 million people tuning in on NBC, making it the most-watched opening ceremony for a summer or winter Olympics ever.

-Let’s not forget social media – we've already seen television analysis of what is trending on Twitter regarding the Games (the Queen skydiving!). There were a documented 9.66 million mentions of the opening ceremony last Friday.

…and those are just a few!
Data from the Games will be analyzed not only by NBC and the IOC, but also governing bodies of the various sports such as FIFA, US Swimming, etc. The data analyzed will not only update the record books, show us how folks are ingesting the coverage (mobile? TV? Live? DVR-ed?), show us what sports are trending, but will also inform the organizing committees and media planning for Sochi and Rio.
If this whets your appetite for more Big Data discussions, I look forward to seeing you at some of the TMRE Big Data sessions. To hold you over until then, someone is looking out for us numbers-junkies of the Olympics at this Olympics data blog!